In my article for the main GC site last week, I took a look at the path to having live sports again. Towards the end, I mentioned how important football is financially to college sports happening at all.
This pandemic really is an existential threat to some college sports programs. There is enough in the details that I think I’ll save some of them for a public article on the site, but that’ll take some time to compile. For now, really take a look at what’s happening.
The non-power Group of Five conferences jointly asked the NCAA to relax its restrictions on Division I eligibility for four years. The requirements they’re looking for leniency on are:
- Schools must sponsor at least 16 total sports
- Schools must offer at least 200 scholarships or spend at least $4 million on scholarships per year, and also offer at least 90% of the maximum allowed scholarships in football
- Schools must play a certain number of home games in some sports against Division I or FBS opponents
- FBS programs must average 15,000 actual or paid attendance in football across a rolling two-year period
The last of those hasn’t really been enforced for a while now. Not to pick on them, but Kent State hasn’t averaged at least 15,000 fans at home games in a single year since 2013. It’s also accepted that basically everyone lies about attendance anyway, so it’s impossible to say how many G5 schools aren’t surpassing the threshold.
It’s mostly fine to overlook MAC teams not hitting that benchmark, but it’s harder to ignore if teams find themselves having to play games in empty stadiums. Or, as the recently released federal guidelines suggest, with fans in attendance following limited, moderate, or strict social distancing protocols.
Setting fake attendance requirements aside, the rest of those are more concerning.
The first one points to a situation where a program might suspend most or all of its non-revenue sports for a period of years. For the athletic programs that require subsidies from their schools just to get by, it may mean suspending all sports for a time.
Not playing for even one year, much less four, easily could be devastating to a program competitively. It would introduce a host of logistical issues, particularly if someone does it one year at a time rather than setting a defined period at the start. However, suspending for a time is probably preferable to shutting the program down entirely for a program with enough cash reserves to keep a few staff on hand for continuity’s sake. That’s probably not many of them though, I would imagine.
The second point plays in with the first. If a school has to go below the required number of sports, it would almost certainly go below the required number of scholarships offered.
The third one is more complex. I don’t know whether a G5 program would make more from a road guarantee game against a P5 opponent or doing its own home guarantee game against an FCS or DII opponent. It probably depends greatly on the school and its enrollment and alumni base. A giant school like UCF might come out ahead with home games if it can convince enough people to come. A smaller private school probably needs the road game.
This is supposing that there are road games to be had, of course. If P5 conferences follow through on some of the speculation of doing a conference play-only 2020 season either this fall or early next year, the G5 teams will be out all those guarantee game matchups. They might still get some or all of the payouts depending on how those contracts were written, but if it’s safe enough to have fans at games, why not try to replace them with home games against lower division opponents? If those games are profitable to any degree, I think you take the money coming and going.
There also is the matter of whether even full conference slates are possible. These proposals are for all of Division I — so it covers FBS, FCS, and DI schools without football — so we’re talking about more than football and more than the P5 and G5. There are plenty of conferences with ten or fewer schools, and there may be a minimum number of matches to make playing even worth it for a league. With all of the unknowns relating to the virus, contingencies may pop up anywhere at any time.
Consider Connecticut. It’s a small state, but thanks in large part to its proximity to New York City, it’s had a bad time with COVID-19. It has the third-highest number of deaths per capita among all states as of this writing, and if New York flares up again, it could easily be collateral damage again.
Suppose that at some point after things reopen enough to allow sports, the governor of Connecticut decides to enforce a lockdown again after cases start to rise. Well, there are seven Division I programs in the state across five different leagues.
The Big East (UConn, starting this year) would still have plenty of teams leftover. The Northeast (Central Connecticut State, Sacred Heart) and MAAC (Fairfield, Quinnipiac) would be down to nine, which probably is enough since there are a number of DI conferences with nine right now. The America East (Hartford) and Ivy League (Yale) would be down to seven full members each, though, leaving just six conference opponents available. They’re all geographically close — except for the California schools that are inexplicably associate members of the America East Conference — so maybe they just play each other twice or something.
But that’s tiny Connecticut. Florida has 13 DI programs. Texas has 23. California has 25. One state lockdown, if it’s just the right (or wrong) one, can mess up a lot of conference schedules.
There is precedent from the relatively distant past, on college sports’s timescale, for some but not all conference members playing. You have to go back to World War II to find the most recent example, but you can also go back to 1918 when both World War I and the so-called Spanish flu led to wildly different amounts of games played for different schools within the same conferences.
There’s no way to know what’s going to happen come the fall, so I think relaxing these requirements makes sense to provide flexibility. But relaxing them for a whole four years? That’s how you know how bad of trouble a lot of programs below the Power 5 level are in.
“Smaller school” is a common euphemism for programs outside the P5 for a reason, even if there are some exceptions (hi again, UCF). A lot of them don’t have the alumni base to do a donation drive to keep things afloat, assuming anyone has money to donate to college sports come late 2020 and 2021. And even the bigger ones like our old friend Kent State (enrollment of over 39,000) probably can’t pull it off because if they could generate a lot of donations for sports, they’d already be doing it.
The pandemic could be an extinction-level event for some college sports programs. Maybe relaxing restrictions will be enough to help out some. Let’s hope so.